14 DAY TRIAL // Chris Forsythe, project lead for Growl, and project manager for Perian, has announced that his popular notification system is set to arrive in the Mac App Store as a regular application.
On the Growl Google Groups page, Forsythe reveals that he and his team are working towards Growl 1.3.
“[Mac OS X ] 10.7 is going to change things for us, and as such here are the changes coming down the pipe,” he writes.
First and foremost, “Growl is going to be put into the Mac App Store.”
The reasons for this are plenty.
Chris and his team of developers are noticing that this is the trend across the OS X community.
The move will make distribution much easier for the devs, and updating for end users. Other benefits listed by Growl’s project lead include:
- This allows us to get rid of the Disk Image entirely. - We can get rid of the PKG installer. - We no longer have to maintain Sparkle. - For most folks this will make Growl much easier to install and keep Growl up to date. - This move also leads to making Growl a much easier application to find.
Thanks to its forthcoming addition to the Mac App Store, Growl will become a full-fledged application, not just a pref-pane tool.
“This fits into the MAS rules more than anything else we're doing,” says Forsythe. “Do not expect any further releases of GrowlMail or GrowlSafari,” he adds.
Growl will become a Lion-only app. OS X 10.6 and below will not be supported in version 1.3 of Growl.
According to Forsythe, the reasoning here is that “10.7 does not cost a lot of money and we feel that in the long run that by supporting 10.6 and 10.7, it would be harder to push forward with Growl development.”
While the framework will not be dedicated to OS X 10.7 and beyond, it will support previous frameworks so that developers coding Growl extensions only need to include one framework.
Also important for devs coding for Growl, the WithInstaller framework is gone starting with version 1.3.
Forsythe concludes, noting that “these changes will take effect as soon as the mercurial repository is put back up.”
A technical difficulty is holding things back, “but it should be resolved by Monday,” he says.